Archbishop of Canterbury Challenges Wall Street on Its Home Turf

For three days this week, the 104th archbishop of Canterbury told economists, theologians and others attending a Wall Street conference that the “fat cats” of the world were not necessarily bad people, just victims of a terrible misunderstanding.

The misunderstanding — shared by people with lots of money, people with aspirations of having lots of money and those with neither — is that money is equated with wealth, he said.

And wealth, said the archbishop, the Most Rev. Rowan D. Williams, leader of world’s 80 million Anglicans — including members of the Episcopal Church in the United States — is the sum of one’s loving relationships with people. It is not, he said, “the number of naughts on the end of a balance sheet.”

The soft-spoken archbishop, wearing a priest’s collar and scuffed black shoes, was the star attraction at a three-day conference called “Building an Ethical Economy,” sponsored by Trinity Church. It ended on Friday.

He exchanged views with a couple of economists, answered questions from the audience and made thoughtful remarks on a variety of weighty topics, including income distribution, justice, the environment, civic duty, intergenerational responsibility, recovering “the language of virtue” from an ocean of commercial lingo and how Jesus would answer the question, “What does a good life look like?”

“The Gospels give us a good picture of what the good life looks like,” Archbishop Rowan said. It resembles, he said, the disciples, extended family and devoted followers who surrounded Jesus during his ministry — a group of people united by “a common identity shaped by the fact that each depends on all others.”

His audience seemed enraptured.

It was harder to tell what the wealth makers and wealth seekers just outside the church, in the heart of the financial district, would make of the archbishop’s viewpoint. Few of them seemed to have registered for the conference.

When a reporter asked several well-dressed men walking by, “What does a good life look like?” he was regarded with suspicion.

Photo

Archbishop Rowan Williams, right, at Trinity Church on Friday. He said he wanted to recover the “language of virtue.”Credit
Ángel Franco/The New York Times

“A good life is having a job, and I’m going to lose mine if I’m late for my meeting,” said one of the few who paused long enough to say anything at all, before striding past the True Religion Brand Jeans store.

During the session on Thursday, at least one voice seemed to speak for Wall Street.

The voice belonged to Susan Lee, an economist and a panelist at one of the discussions. She said that perhaps economists and theologians could agree in theory about what the archbishop said.

“But in practice,” added Ms. Lee, a former editorial page editor at The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, “our two groups seem to live on different planets.”

Theologians just do not seem to get it where money is concerned, she said. “They assume that there can be profit without private property, work without incentive, enterprise without income inequality.”

The name of the game, Ms. Lee said, is not income redistribution, but income generation. If the economy does not generate money, there is no money to distribute or redistribute, she said.

The archbishop took notes as she spoke. When it was his turn again, he said he was not against the generation of wealth; he was against the accumulation of it in sums far beyond the capacity of anyone to meaningfully use it.

And he said he opposed what he called “the logic of some kinds of capitalist practice that leads to the invention of more and more recondite, metaphysical, unreal forms of wealth” — a reference to derivatives — that may look good on paper but “correspond to nothing.”

“You say theologians don’t talk about the real world,” he added. “But sometimes in recent years, it’s the economists that don’t talk about the real world.”

The audience — divinity students, scholars and elderly people who looked either like Adlai E. Stevenson in his later years or Dame Judi Dench — erupted in soft applause.

A version of this article appears in print on January 30, 2010, on page A18 of the New York edition with the headline: Archbishop of Canterbury Challenges Wall Street on Its Home Turf. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe